Tailors Manuals

This is little more than a glorified bookmark, but I found a great blog listing all the known Tailor's pattern books from approximately 1550-1650.  I don't want to lose it, so I'm putting it on my blog.

http://research.fibergeek.com/2018/05/31/tailoring-manuals/

Map Margins

In my quest to find additional sources for middle class clothing in England, I took a tour of the maps in Civitates orbis terrarum.  This is a 6 volume set of maps of the world published between 1572 and 1617 in Cologne.  The volumes are edited by Georg Braun with many of the engravings done by Franz Hogenberg.

Many of the maps contain figures in the margins.  It can be difficult to date the figures as the engravings often pre-date the publication date by a decade or more and the engravings are often based on drawings made even earlier.  On the upside, we know that Hogenberg did actually visit England around 1568-9, which is more than we can prove for some of the illustrators of the costume books I looked in my last post.  Additionally, some of the original drawings of the English maps and figures are by a William Smith, who I presume to be an Englishman.

You can find more details in this blog and on this site.  

Even knowing all the challenges with using this as a source for costume study, I still find the collection of figures quite interesting.

London

From volume 1, published 1572, drawn ~1560, high resolution, supporting details

Cambridge

From volume 2, published 1575, drawn ~1574 (William Smith), high resolution, supporting details

Oxford and Windsor

From volume 2, published 1575, high resolution, supporting details

Bristol

From volume 3, published 1581, drawn 1568 (William Smith), high resolution, supporting details

Chester

From volume 3, published 1581, drawn by William Smith, high resolution, supporting details

Norwich

From volume 3, published 1581, drawn by William Smith, high resolution, supporting details

Canterbury

From volume 4, published 1588, drawn by William Smith, high resolution, supporting details

Nonsuch Palace

From volume 5, published 1598, engraving dated 1582, high resolution

York / Shrewsbury / Lancaster / Richmond

From volume 6, published 1617, drawn by Hondius, high resolution, supporting details

In looking at these with the dates that are known and comparing to the handy pictures by decade from The Tudor Tailor (p.13), here are my best guesses as to dates of the costumes.  The size of the ruffs are the easiest feature to track across time...

London - 1550-60's

Cambridge - 1560-70's

Oxford and Windsor - 1560-70's

Bristol - 1560's

Chester - 1570's

Norwich - 1570's

Canterbury - 1570's

Nonsuch Palace - 1570's

York / Shrewsbury / Lancaster / Richmond - 1590's-1600's

16th-17th Century Costume Manuscripts

I've been fascinated for a while with some of the books full of illustrations and engravings from the 16th and 17th century.  Some (Vecellio's comes to mind) are a tad fanciful with depictions of costumes from around the world including natives from the new world.  Many seem a bit more realistic, especially as the locations illustrated near the publication origin.

Over the years, I've collected a few of these sources, but never came across any English in origin.  So, I went on a quest to see just how many I could find.  I ended up including more than just costume books.  One of my favorite sources for men's customer is a military manual by Jacob de Gheyn published in 1607 (the engravings were completed in 1598).  I also found some album amicorums that contain several illustrations useful to costume study.

So far, I've found 33 manuscripts that are mostly available on line.  This includes 6 from Italy, 4 from France, 15 from Germany and 8 from the Netherlands area.  Unfortunately, none I've found are English, which was the original reason for my search.  I'm keeping a Pinterest board to collect them all.

Publication Origin - Italian

Publication Origin - Dutch

Publication Origin - French

Publication Origin - German

Even with only limited English images (drawn by those who may or may not have ever visited England), there are a lot of wonderful details to be found in these books.  I've toyed with the idea of building some computer vision models to identify types of garments, but that's more effort than I'm willing to put in just yet.  (maybe soon!)